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Ross Douthat

The liberal hour

But as a counterpoint to the inauguration hoopla, here are three reasons why Obama might not be remembered as the kind of “liberal Reagan” that he seems to be today.

1) Obama’s political victories are clearer than his policy accomplishments. The question of whether Obamacare will be implemented has been answered; the question of whether it can survive its own design flaws has not. The question of whether Obamanomics would be rejected by the public in the short run has been answered; the question of whether it can produce the kind of longer-run growth that previous generations of Americans took for granted has not. (The sluggish economic recovery barely figured into the second inaugural, and the president talked more about green industrial policy than about the plight of the unemployed.) The question of whether Obama’s foreign policy would avoid major disasters and be an asset in his re-election bid has been answered; the question of whether his navigation of the Arab Spring and his attempts to contain Iran will look skillful in hindsight has not. Obama plainly turned the social issues to his party’s advantage last year (with a major assist from Todd Akin). But a tentative and ambiguous pro-choice trend in public opinion after a long period of pro-life gains does not mean that liberals have won the abortion wars, especially given that the main policy shift of the Obama era has been an uptick in state-level abortion restriction. And even on gay marriage, where most observers — myself included — assume that the Obama era will be remembered as genuinely transformational, that transformation has only actually been achieved in nine of the fifty states. …

2) Liberalism, no less than conservatism, is riven by internal contradictions. The Obama majority does indeed reflect the diversity of twenty-first America, just as its enthusiastic boosters claim: It’s the party of Silicon Valley billionaires and immigrants who work at Wal-Mart, of public sector employees and affluent dual-earner professionals, of the secular academy and the black church, of the multiracial Southwest and white New England. But for political parties as well as human societies, diversity is as often a weakness as a strength, and it’s easy enough to imagine scenarios where the Democratic Party of the near-future fractures along lines of race or geography, class or culture.

Blowback

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Like most political columns, this is just so much BS. Most voters view an election, especially a presidential election, as “who is the lesser of the two evils”? Last year, they decided it was Obama (thanks to a media-assisted campaign to make Romney look like it was him.) They are going to be surprised.

Is there any real support for progressivism or Obama? Did you see it in the campaign – maybe the empty chairs were jumping up and down for him. Did you see it Monday at the inauguaration? Outside of the “journ0lists”, most of the people who came were more interested in what they were smoking than what he was saying.

2) Liberalism, no less than conservatism, is riven by internal contradictions.

No, it really isn’t. The uniting principle behind modern day liberalism/socialism is “We’re going to take your money and redistribute it, mostly to ourselves.”

ALL liberals are broadly united around this principle. It is their first principle, and all their other ballyhooed causes, such as environmentalism, peace activism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, and free speech ALWAYS take a backseat to this uniting principle, something almost all liberals instinctively understand. Peace activism and free speech in particular have suffered huge body blows during the Obama administration, but most liberals can’t even pretend to care anymore about those causes, now that they have served their purposes. Those who don’t get behind the first principle of liberalism were purged from the party long ago.

He has a point about conservatism though. The current conservative movement is made up of people who support amnesty and support a halt to illegal immigration, by people who want to cut spending and people who think that government spending just needs to be managed better, isolationists and war hawks, and social liberals and social conservatives and people stuck in between.

The “big tent” of the Republican Party has gotten too big and something has to give.

Walter Russel Mead had an interesting article the other day talking about the enduring political traditions in America – New England Puritanism, Virginia Jeffersonianism, etc. I think he’s right about that, and I think Douhat’s probably right about the instability of the Democrat coalition – at some point, conflicting interests between the government clients that make up the Democrat Party will cause a rift that will be hard to recover from.